Academic underachievement of students from disadvantaged backgrounds is an ongoing and unresolved problem. Schools serving vulnerable communities often fail to meaningfully engage their students who are often exposed to significant family and environmental adversities. However, where the educational landscape is overwhelmed with neoliberal…

This study aims to examine the visual artwork made by children as a result of the visual arts education practices of preschool teachers in institutions in terms of having tool- or art-oriented structures. The working group of the study consists of the visual artwork created by 763 children attending the lessons given by 61 teachers working at 18…

The standard educational gesture--in defense of its perceived secondary status relative to the "real world"--is to embed everything within its purview, such that even conceiving education as an art becomes a pedagogic imperative. In Anji County, China, we find an early childhood program (Anji Play) that uncouples play from this hierarchy…

In an attempt to connect theory and practice with regard to research on creativity and visual arts, this study aims to explore how visual materials created by children can help determine qualitative parameters in the process of observing creative activity. These materials are the result of a series of workshops designed by the authors, artists,…

The purpose is to contribute knowledge to the field regarding the role of aesthetic experience when young students participate in intertwined science-art activities in science class. More precisely, we scrutinise how science suggestions are shaped in students' processes of imagination when exploring animal's ecology. Data corpus comprises audio…

The aim of this study was to examine the role of aesthetic practice in elementary school and the consequences for children's meaning-making in science. More specifically, we intended to scrutinise what science learning emerges within the process, to target the consequences of adopting art practice in science class and to explore these two…

In this article, I examine collage in pre-service teacher education as an arts-based theory and practice to interrogate knowledge in the classroom; how it gets generated, by whom, and to what end. I consider how historical legacies of collage that revolutionized modern art by shifting focus away from technique and mastery toward concept, process,…

The relationship between signs and human action is one of the most-widely studied theories in art and communication. Humans are constantly producing new discourse and new discursive devices, and the issue of the relationship between signs / action not only remains open but is branching off and forming hybrids towards other materials. This work…

This study aimed to improve the education process by enabling children to associate natural environmental experience with art and to include it into aesthetic experience in place-based visual arts applications. Accordingly, answers for subquestions such as how it can be possible for children to create nature-art relation through place-based…

With its inherent attributes such as qualitative immediacy, imaginativeness, and embodiment, John Dewey's concept of aesthetic experience makes a difference in moral education, in the ways of empathetic moral perception, moral reasoning, and moral action. If it matters then how can we help students gain aesthetic experience? By analyzing teacher…

Here we examine the role art activities play in aesthetic experience and learning of science. We compare recordings of two sequential occurrences in an elementary school class. The purpose of the first sequence was scientific and involved the children in observing leaves with magnifiers. The second sequence had an artistic purpose, where the…

In this text we compare children's expressions in drawings to their statements during interviews, for the purpose of understanding how different situations afford children to make meaning. In specific we study how two different activities interact and afford children to make meaning differently about the human body. The analytic attention is…

This article examines the role that drawing can play in enabling children and young people to theorize concepts of time. In two, independent Australian research projects, children aged between 5 and 8 years were asked to respond to the question, "What might the future be like?", while 12-14 year olds were asked, "What does history…

To mitigate educational challenges, K-8 students enrolled in the Migrant Education Program (MEP) at Fuerte School District spend the majority of their after-school class time in a Saturday Academy program completing required curricular tasks associated with structured research-based programs to strengthen reading, writing, mathematics, and science…

With increased attention to measurable, common student achievement outcomes, the experience of both students and teachers has been overlooked. While measurable outcomes may possess value, they have served to shift the focus of schools, administrators, and teachers to writing curriculum that centers on assessable content learning rather than…